MarineBlue in Review – You’ll Feel Like You’re Drowning

MarineBlue is essentially a shoot-em-up game by developer IndieAn (makers of the hit game Heavy Mach 2(TMA Review)). Your character is some kind of sea creature (your guess is as good as mine), and the idea is to tap the screen to shoot at other underwater beasties to stop them from reaching the bottom of the screen. When they do, they’ll start eating away at the time you’ve got to play the level, which is 180 seconds. The idea is to get the best score you can in the time you have.

It may sound fun, but it isn’t, not really. The game is simplistic to the point of being boring. You’ll very quickly suss out that constantly tapping different areas of the screen will shoot your enemies into smithereens and get you lots of points. You don’t have to plan any kind of strategy, or be very careful about what you’re doing. There’s no limit on your ammunition, so randomly tapping works just fine.

Blasting entire schools of fish will give you bonus items. These appear in your armoury, and you tap them when you want to use them and then deploy as normal. These different types of bullets and bombs don’t make the game any more interesting, I’m afraid.

It’s a shame the gameplay is such a let down, because the graphics and sound on this game are really nice, funky and fun. The developers have even gone so far as to make MarineBlue work on OpenFeint, so there are various achievements you can hit during gameplay. However, I think most people will probably play the game a couple of times and realise how little else there is to do gameplay wise and not care whether their high score is better than anyone else’s or not.

Yes, it’s cheap. Yes, it’s cute. But sadly, it’s still incredibly dull and won’t keep the average adult entertained for very long. Maybe kids will like it, but if they’re old enough to have an iPod Touch, they’re probably old enough to realise this game is snooze-worthy. Now if you’re a fan of the blow-em-up genre and still care to check it out, IndieAn have also released a free version dubbed MarineBlue Lite for the iPhone/iPod Touch and MarineBlueHD Lite for the iPad.